"The Knight's Fork Weekly" --- ISSUE 2 --- Battle of the FMs!

After a long day of chess with the first day of the Blitz portion of the Grand Chess Tour: Paris, and the 3rd of four days overall in the books with some very promising exciting chess tomorrow, I decided to do the second issue of this tonight, even though I'm fighting a bad sinus infection.

Tonight, in LIVE Chess, as you can tell by the header for this blog, there's a Battle of the FMs going on, in 1|0 time controls, between two U.S. players, FMsMasterLeif and asms9699. As of right now, their bullet match is 33 games in, with MasterLeif ahead 19.5-13.5 with no signs of slowing down.

So I decided to take some of their games and throw them in a blog for you to see or analyze, since I don't feel well enough to spend the time doing it myself tonight with another long chess day tomorrow coming and me feeling completely awful. As with last week's issue, there will be no analysis (that's your job for right now ) but I will mention what opening they used in each game I will showcase, which is probably only three or four.

I will be getting the PGNs from here, and using Chessbase for however little amounts of facts I'll mention. Sound good? Good. Let's get going.

This game begins with an A26 English Opening vs. King's Indian and goes 37 moves before asms9699 comes away with the win:

The next one is one of the first games in this match, which ended as I was typing this sentence. The overall score was 21.0-14.0 in MasterLeif's favor, as was this game, and lasted 100 moves(!!) and yes, it was a 1|0. Nothing special about this opening, just a D00 1. d4 d5, so here is the marathon game and the longest in the entire series:

The third game isn't as long, but it's of a very decent length, at 71 moves, with a checkmate by asms9699 on White's move 71. On the other end, it began with an A20 English Opening 1. e5:

The last game up tonight ended in a stalemate after 62 moves in a D02 1. d4 d5 2. Nf3 sidelines. Let's see here if you can spot the proper continuation that wouldn't have ended in a stalemate.

Alright everyone, that's it for now. I've been at this thing all day with chess fighting fevers and pain. Keep your chess antennae tuned in for more blogs about well, whatever I feel like doing next week. Have a good night everyone!

Co-creator, along my with girlfriend RookedonChess, of the Official Chess.com/TV Group, back in November of 2010 with the support of Chess.com, namely IMDavid Pruess and IMDanny Rensch. The group has since boiled over the 1500 member mark and is growing more and more every day and new shows and events are constantly being added to the arsenal. There's always something happening in the group. Don't miss out.

I am now once again doing my chess journalism on Chess.com, following news, events, announcements, etc. I'm not going to let a couple of idiotic people chase me away from what I love to do. If I get any bad comments, they will be deleted right away.